AMD, which bought Xilinx for $50 billion, made another surprise move, announcing a $1.9 billion acquisition of cloud startup Pensando. Through this acquisition, in addition to symbolizing AMD's formal entry into the FIELD of DPU, Lisa Su's blueprint for AMD data center is the last piece of the puzzle, which has now completely covered CPU, GPU, FPGA, DPU, and the entire cloud layout is more complete.

AMD's two biggest rivals, Nvidia and Intel, have entered the DPU space to strengthen their data center layouts. Nvidia's $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox in 2020 was a shot at DPU; Intel IPU is the same as DPU concept, in fact, are SmartNIC, in the cloud for the CPU to reduce the burden.

Founded in 2017 by four former Cisco engineers, Pensando specializes in chip technology and software optimized for data-flow-oriented workloads for a wide range of applications, including smart switches. Key customers include Goldman Sachs, Microsoft's cloud arm Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and more.

Pensando's product is "distributed Service Card" (DSC), similar to SmartNIC but with a computing core. The latest generation of distributed service card, Elba, is based on the Arm CPU core architecture and is operated by TSMC's 7nm process technology.

AMD's Pensando acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of this year. Pensando's current CEO Prem Jain and the entire team will join AMD's Data Center Solutions group.

Aspiring to be "the Nvidia of infrastructure," Pensando co-founder and CTO Vipin Jain has developed an accelerator that takes the load off the CPU (SmartNIC/DPU/IPU) and ties it to a distributed services platform. The platform coordinates the task of deploying related workloads to these devices.